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JAKABON
DESIGNS

DUGALD CAMERON







As a former student, teacher and eventually director at GSA as well as the founder of PDE, it was a pleasure to hear Dugald Cameron’s stories from across his career. I’m not certain a lot of what he’s done would even be possible now - going for an underwater drink and impromptu trip to Liverpool with the crew of a submarine certainly isn’t - so it was great to hear them all first hand. As an 84 year old, the quality of the talk and the amount Dugald was able to remember (especially the registration numbers of individual planes) was amazing, especially as he also managed to make it one of the funniest talks of the D&T series so far.



Most of all, it was amazing to see all his drawings from when he was a student. The ‘general course’ at GSA as it was called back then, gave an intro to a whole range of techniques as opposed to the more developed degree courses now available. It was also reassuring to hear first hand his passion for the PDE course, its place within the art school and the breadth of applications and doors he believes it opens.


Seeing his drawings all laid out I felt the same as I did within Frank Stephenson’s visit, that I want to improve. One aspect PDE feels lacking in is this focus on sketching and creating artwork. Maybe this is a product of my cohort being forced to have drawing lessons over zoom in our first year or maybe it’s due to a greater focus on technology nowadays but drawing’s a very hard thing to teach and an even less encouraging thing to improve at. It's also something that comes very naturally to some people meaning that as one of those who has to try significantly harder it can end up feeling pretty unattainable to improve.


I draw enough to keep to a decent level but not enough to call myself a good artist, however having had Dugald and Frank in for our last two talks, I really want to try and improve this. I know that unless I put time into a piece I’ll always have the same loose, sketchy style, however the quality of line and comfortability with a pencil is something that I think I lack and that really sets people like Dugald’s work apart. So much of drawing is about confidence with the pen and this obviously all comes from practice. The goal is to practice enough to reach Dugald's levels of confidence…


“With an eraser and my 2 HB pencils, I'll conquer the world”








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